eLearning, Expanding the Education Envelope

As education institutes taste success in terms of deploying and maintaining e-learning systems, services associated with eLearning, including content creation and platform integration services such as “Virtual classrooms” are increasingly gaining popularity in India.
elearning environments are taking advantage of synchronous experiences such as classes, seminars, and e-mentoring, as well as digital online courses and flexible learning content creation and deployment opportunities. 
The overall segment of e-learning is expected to grow in adoption across all vertical markets due to their ease of use and increase in awareness about the benefits of deploying learning management systems (LMS) and/or learning content management systems (LCMS) for managing many of the artifacts associated with virtual teaching and training activities. 
Learning going Virtual
Today’s more flexible virtual classroom systems for eLearning create more demand for commercial and community-produced learning content assets. Attractive offerings such as simulation-based learning, games-based learning, and mobile learning are also expected to drive the future demand for more and higher quality digital content.
It is interesting to note that, eLearning as we know it in 2011 is not the same eLearning that first appeared on the education and training industry’s horizon about five years back. Back then, excitement came from realizing that the Internet had the power to completely transform teaching, training, learning, and performance support practices. 
Excitement about the possibilities caused eLearning’s well-wishers to over-promise on what they believed eLearning offered to the education, training, and performance support industries. Not surprisingly, eLearning under delivered on virtually all of its many promises. Following the dot-com crash of 2001, eLearning practitioners, from instructional designers and content analysts to web designers and graphic artists, experience designers, and system integrators—took a good, hard look at the things that worked in successful eLearning programs. 
Later on, what came out was an appreciation for programs that delivered scalable, standardized courses that achieved reliable, repeatable results. And moving forward, whether it is a small or medium sized organization or an enterprise, putting learning in the virtual world is surely going to provide gains on the long term basis and this is likely to drive the e-learning market in India as well as on a global scale.